Navy Will Name Ship for Harvey Milk, Slain Gay Rights Leader

In a sign of changing times for the American military, the Navy plans to name a ship for Harvey Milk, the gay rights leader and San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated in 1978.

Ray Mabus, the secretary of the Navy, has notified Congress that he will name a fleet oiler for Mr. Milk, the first openly gay elected official in a major American city. The notice was reported by USNI News on Thursday and was confirmed Friday by a Navy official.

Gay rights activists and friends of Mr. Milk in San Francisco were already celebrating the long-awaited news. In 2012, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling on Mr. Mabus to name a ship for Mr. Milk, who served in the Navy from 1951 to 1955.

“When Harvey Milk served in the military, he couldn’t tell anyone who he truly was,” he wrote. “Now our country is telling the men and women who serve, and the entire world, that we honor and support people for who they are.”

Mr. Milk joined the Navy in 1951 and was stationed in San Diego as a diving instructor. He left in 1955 with the rank of lieutenant junior grade, according to a biography on the website of the Harvey Milk Foundation, run by his nephew, Stuart Milk.

Both of his parents also served in the Navy; his mother was a “yeomanette” during World War I, the biography says.

In the years that Mr. Milk served, military policy banned gay, lesbian and bisexual service members. Gay sailors were often harassed, court-martialed and given dishonorable discharges. Those practices were eased somewhat in 1994 with the Clinton administration’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allowed them to serve if they did not disclose their orientations. Mr. Obama lifted that in 2011.

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Mr. Milk took the oath of office for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Jan. 1, 1978.Credit...The New York Times

Mr. Mabus, who has made it a priority to expand the Navy’s fleet since he was appointed by the president in 2009, has provoked some controversy with his naming decisions. Among his choices have been the civil rights activist Cesar Chavez and former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Democrat who survived being shot in the head at a campaign event in 2011.

Some lawmakers have argued that Navy ships should only bear the names of former presidents or of people who have served in the military.

In January, Mr. Mabus named a ship after Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, a pivotal leader of the civil rights movement. Mr. Mabus said that ship, yet to be built, would be the first of six new “fleet replenishment oilers,” which bring fuel and supplies to other Navy ships at sea. The Harvey Milk would be the second ship in that fleet.

The notification to Congress listed names for four other ships:

• Sojourner Truth, who escaped slavery in 1826 and traveled the country as an evangelist and rights activist.

• Earl Warren, the Supreme Court justice who spoke for the court in the 1954 case that struck down legal school segregation.

• Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, senator and brother of President Kennedy who pushed for civil rights before he was assassinated in 1968.

• Lucy Stone, the women’s rights activist and abolitionist.

Mr. Milk was born in New York City and worked on Wall Street after his Navy service, then moved to San Francisco, where he opened a camera shop and became a leader in the gay community around Castro Street. He was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977.

Mr. Milk had received many death threats, and he recorded messages in case he was killed. “If a bullet should enter my brain,” he said in one, “let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

His life continues to be a touchstone. On Thursday, at the Democratic National Convention, Tim Kaine, the vice presidential nominee, mentioned him in his roll call of civil rights leaders. “Harvey gave his life,” Mr. Kaine said, to cheers from the crowd.